A Winter’s Tale

Halbert Crawford Boffington is a child of his times. Having come of age during the late ’60s and early ’70s, he regards himself as an ancient sage in the style of Carlos Castaneda, but probably more closely resembles a delusional old hippie. A specialist in telling tales of the Summer of Love, drug-permeated rock concerts and anti-war protests he never actually attended, he is known jokingly as Master of the Past. Though graying, and balding too, he insists on keeping what is left of his hair long and tied back in a pony tail, held with a Native-American Indian-looking piece of leather adorned with a few turquoise colored beads and a silver clasp.  

Hal, or Halitosis, as he is called, lives off what is left of his inheritance. He touts his beer-drinking binges and handwritten pages of song lyrics as the epitome of an artistic nature. He fancies himself to be a musician, once having played drums in local rock bands, and still has his drum kit set up in his garage flanked by other outmoded gear; a guitar amplifier, a P.A. system with two speaker columns, but only one that works, a reel-to-reel tape recorder, some microphones and other paraphernalia interspersed with garden tools, a lawnmower, rake, some old car parts from his Volkswagen hatchback that he doesn’t have anymore, all seasoned by the aroma wafting from two garbage cans situated by the kitchen door.

Hal’s musical abilities have always been suspect, however, earning him the sobriquet of Boss of Blunder or Baron of Boff, referring no doubt to his penchant for skipping or rushing the beat, thus throwing the tempo off and causing what musicians call a train wreck. Hal is often seen going about playing imaginary drums in the air with invisible drumsticks. This physical manifestation truly characterizes Hal’s subliminal mentality. Hal doesn’t play much anymore, if at all, but he still harbors the sentiment that if he could only meet the right people, and be given a lucky break, he might yet ascend to Rock and Roll Stardom.

To help establish this elusive claim to fame Hal maintains a lifestyle suitable to one who is only a week away from celebrity, at all times. He abuses drugs, particularly marijuana and cocaine with a ferocious tenacity. In this pursuit he is limited only by his lack of funds, because while his thirst is deep, his pockets are shallow. Hal once declined a modest offer of employment when faced with the medical insurance questionnaire, which precluded coverage for experimental drugs. “I’m not signing that,” Hal proclaimed. “I’ve been experimenting with drugs for 30 years, and I feel as though I’m on the verge of a breakthrough,” he quipped. “Besides,” he added, “it takes a lot to establish just the right balance of alcohol and drugs, to get the exact equilibrium is part of my dream quest, so don’t be messing with my high,” he admonishes.

Hal’s father committed suicide when Hal was quite young, and he has no actual memory of the event itself, but bears undying scars of the aftermath. Hal’s mother soon remarried, not to say quickly thereafter, but it should be mentioned in the interest of verisimilitude, that some were appalled by the apparent hastiness of it.

Never close to his adoptive father, and growing distant from his mother as she pursued the interests of her new matrimonial alliance, Hal wasn’t particularly annoyed when they both died in a plane crash. It was at this time that Hal learned to ply the trade that stood him in good stead for his future endeavors, that of an enterprising paralegal.

 Because his parents had perished intestate, that is to say having made no provision for their untimely demise, Hal was forced, in order to acquire legal title to their property and bank accounts to undergo an intense process of probate, having to do battle first with the State of California, then with his stepfather’s daughter, Jolene, who although having been estranged from her father for some years without any contact whatsoever, could smell the stench of easy money. Both Hal and Jolene felt that they could rationalize their greed by vilifying their parents’ memory in a bald-faced attempt to seize their legacy. Through this grueling, drawn-out process, Hal acquired considerable skills as a litigator, and eventually wore Jolene down. She had troubles of her own, financial and personal, which are not the subject of this narrative, and was eventually willing to settle for an inconsequential amount in the interest of haste. Since that time, Hal has been a frequent customer in small claims and civil litigation courts, and has been relatively successful in suing people. “Give a man a fish and you feed him for one day, but teach him to sue and he’ll feed himself for life,” Hal used to quip. Beyond his activities on the peripheral fringes of the legal system, it is unclear if Hal has ever held a paying job.

Hal supplements his earnings by renting out a room in his house, and has had a wild assortment of tenants over the years. Trying at first to rent only to women, which enterprise after successive unfortunate attempts ended in utter catastrophe when one young lady threatened to sue Hal for sexual harassment. When Hal drinks and uses drugs, which he does with comparative frequency, budgetary constraints notwithstanding, he becomes boorish and inflamed with passion. Apparently the young lady didn’t see why she should have to continue to pay rent after submitting to Hal’s relentless sexual advances. He threatened to counter-sue and eventually the stalemate was dropped out of a sense of mutual frustration. Since that time, he has reluctantly but sensibly rented the room to men, the most recent of whom is C.J., a friend of a friend, and even though there has been considerable friction between them, C.J.’s lifestyle is infinitely more compatible with Hal’s than any of his female predecessors.

Considering that the winter solstice had come and gone, the newspaper reporting that temperatures in Chicago just above 30 degrees, and New York not much above freezing, it really is an unseasonably warm day, indecently warm, even by Los Angeles standards. In fact, it is actually hot outside. But what people in colder climates don’t realize is that when it is a warm winter’s day in L.A. one has an uneasy sense of foreboding, like something is wrong, like something bad is going to happen. It’s like living on borrowed time, or skating on thin ice, although this wintry analogy has no place in Southern California where the only ice that is seen is in the refrigerator. The whole world seems suffused with an ominous glow, like a nuclear reactor giving off too much heat before a meltdown. It’s not a friendly, warm, comfortable heat, but a dangerous, slowly smoldering dry heat that smells of imminent disaster. It feels like a feverish, sweaty sickness, a solar-induced infection like a virus burning through the cellular walls of living flesh. People go about their business, trying not to think that something is wrong, but their instincts tell them and they never quite escape the unsettling notion that the temperature shouldn’t be in the mid-80s in December.

On such a day, Hal decides that it is better to stay inside, where he can run the air conditioner in his room because the weather outside is too warm. The house has central heat and air, but Hal prefers to run the electrical wall unit in his room, because that way the coolness or heat, as he alone decides, can be restricted to only his room. He harbors the concept that it is cheaper that way. After all, his room is a considerably smaller space than the whole house and would use less energy to cool. Why should he pay the cost of C.J.’s air conditioning? No point in getting all dressed up, either, because Hal didn’t have to work that day. In fact, no point in getting dressed at all, better to just wear his Chinese bathrobe. It is made of a very smooth, shiny black satin material, with a fire-breathing dragon emblazoned in colorful embroidery across the back. He had purchased it down in Chinatown, relatively cheap, and it actually is a pretty good one. Hal never wears much of anything else when he is home. Hal has never washed the bathrobe, because he is afraid the fabric will rot, or come apart, since he doesn’t really know what it is made of, and is unsure what might happen to the elegant dragon if he did, so instead of laundering it, he treats it very carefully, folding it gingerly when he disrobes, as though by handling it delicately, it would never become soiled or smelly. This might seem repugnant to you, but if it did smell, which most likely it did, it only smelled of Hal, and he is used to that anyway, so what does it matter?

The trouble with Hal and people like him is that it is not a good idea to leave them alone for too long, left to their own devisings. Bad things are always forthcoming, and today is no exception. Without enough to do, Hal begins the day by drinking. At first, he had just a couple of beers, then some more. “Hell, there’s no such thing as just having one beer,” he regales himself. “That’s why they sell ’em in six-packs.” For Hal, that’s why they sell them in cases. He never troubles himself to keep score of how many are quaffed. Come to think of it, I hope no one is counting my beers, either, but that’s not part of the story. Soon enough, and still quite early in the day, feeling sloshy after ingesting quite a lot of suds, Hal needs to mellow out by smoking a little pot. “What I need,” he reminds himself, “is a little spliff to stabilize.” So like a ship takes on ballast water to right its course against the wind, Hal gets a little bit wasted.

You probably can imagine how the rest of the day will go. At his age, Hal requires considerable quantities of beer and weed to maintain a steady state of equalized stabilization. A hot winter’s day is not like a hot summer’s day. In the summer, long drowsy afternoons creep gently into a soft twilight, the world barely noticing the gradual shift from day to night. When the moon finally arises in the summer sky, the hour is already quite late, and festivities are well underway. In the winter, night pounces suddenly like a cat on a bird, and without warning it is dark, and still early.

With nothing much to occupy his mind, Hal is often given to amusing himself with adult on-line entertainments. As a frequent visitor to the innumerable free porn sites that proliferate like a plague of insects behind the veil of cyber-sewage, Hal knows well enough the ins and outs of surfing the web. On this particular afternoon, having imbibed an ample infusion of the necessary chemical emollients, Hal tunes in to one of his favorites, www.girlsnightout.com. This particular Web site features the attractive option of making the local girls pictured available for hire. I have heard Hal complain that most often the girl pictured is not actually the one who shows up, but I have no first-hand knowledge of that myself. Here I must advise you not to try it, because judging by the effect it has upon people, whose behavior may ordinarily be normal and nice enough, they may possibly become inflamed with a kind of angry passion, and this is exactly what happened to Hal on this occasion.

I should add that sometimes just beer and weed by themselves don’t do it for Hal, especially when he commences his binge early in the day. He often supplements his intoxication with as much cocaine as he has been able to procure, given his budgetary constraints. You notice I didn’t say that he used some cocaine. The word “some” would imply a concept of moderation of the quantities to be administered at certain intervals. Those who understand these things know that once it starts, it doesn’t stop until it’s completely gone, including licking the plate, or glass, or spoon, or whatever implements have been employed in the process of ingesting the drug, even sniffing around on the carpet to see if some microscopic bit of coke has somehow, despite immaculate scrutiny, managed to escape. It is at this frenzied point, when the cocaine is played, the beer is drunk, and the weed no longer holds any beneficent efficacy, overwhelmed by feelings of sexual lust induced by porn sites, with too much time left on the clock, things can get out of control.

With the room dimly lit only by the seductive glow of the monitor screen, Hal feels like a caged animal. He peers out the sliding door that leads onto the patio where a dull yellow porch light doesn’t quite illuminate the backyard beyond, then fueled by a raging fit of frustration, infuriated by God knows what demons in addition to those I have already recounted, Hal tears off his bathrobe and giving a yell and a whoop, runs out into the night.